It’s probably about time to let my subscribers know that I’ve started blogging over at the AddonBakery Blog – so all posts which relate to my ExpressionEngine Addons will end up there (instead of here).

This blog will be reserved for all non-addon specific ramblings. Who knows, I might also put up a portfolio here. I probably should, I am after all a freelance developer… I’ll do it when I get the time ;)

For those who don’t quite understand the title; Automattic is the company behind the world’s favourite blogging engine1 – WordPress, and EllisLab are creators of fine products such as CodeIgniter – and, the commercial CMS ExpressionEngine. Now that you have the basics, the title will make sense later.

“With an archive dating back to 2002 and over 750,000 comments, this is the largest Expression Engine2 migration to date. MacDailyNews brings with them a very active community and an ever-burning desire to publish.”

It made me think of a specific moment last friday. I was eating breakfast in a cabin in the mountains of Norway, listening to the radio – the breaking news being the Nokia & Microsoft partnership, but – and isn’t technology beautiful – I was also reading this blogpost on my mobile:

In it, Byrne Reese the former Product Manager of Movable Type and TypePad at Six Apart lays out specific reasons he thinks contributed to WordPress winning the “blog wars” over MovableType.

Tactic: Migrate, then blog the hell out of it

One thing rarely cited by the outside world, probably because it was not visible or apparent to anyone, was the systematic targeting of high profile brands to switch from using any competing platform to using WordPress. In fact, in the four years I was at Six Apart, if I had a dollar every time a significant and loyal TypePad and Movable Type customer confided in me that an employee of Automattic cold called them to encourage and entice them to switch to WordPress I would have quit a rich man. Automattic would extend whatever services it could, at no expense to the customer, getting them to switch. They would give away hosting services. They would freely dedicate engineers to the task of migrating customers’ data from one system to another. They would do whatever it took to move people to WordPress.

And once a migration was complete they did the single most important thing: they blogged the hell out of it.

So, it could seem that Automattic is pulling old tricks on EllisLab. However, a quick google shows that there hasn’t been much mention of ExpressionEngine on the publisher blog until now. Also, it’s not the same situation as back in the days when MovableType and WordPress were equally popular.

Nonetheless …

What do you think?

Is Automattic using the same tactics on EllisLab that they were using earlier on Six Apart?

Will we see more of these blogposts from Automattic as ExpressionEngine grows in popularity?

The “Basecamp Style Subdomains With CodeIgniter” over at NetTuts was tweeted and retweeted all over the place, or maybe just twice, but anyway – this is supereasy in EE, and can be done by adding just a couple of lines to index.php:

What the above snippet of code will do is check if the current URL the user is on is ‘login.example.com’ – if it is it will change the ‘site_url’ variable to override the default one (so that {path=”} etc will use that URL. Also it will make sure the ‘index’ template in the template group called ‘login’ is used (if the user is not on a subpage that is).

Of course you could add all kinds of magic here – having Apache accept all and every subdomain, fetching a specific template group and adding the subdomain to the global variables ($assign_to_config[‘global_vars’]) .. for instance to implement a username.example.com solution. You could even throw some .htaccess in the mix if you really needed it ;)